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Transforming a Neighborhood into a Brotherhood

My
brothers and sisters, we are only beginning. We still have a long long way to
go and I would like to share with you the burden on my heart about the problems
that still confront us. If I would use a subject for what I am talking about, I
would call it; Transforming a
neighborhood into a brotherhood. I want to try and tell you the truth; i
want to speak honestly and frankly about many problems that we face in our
nation and this world. I believe that freedom is the bonus we receive for
telling the truth and as Jesus said, “ye
shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free”. Transforming a
neighborhood into a brotherhood.

Now
there can be no gainsaying of the fact that Uganda has brought its people –
downtrodden and rich alike - to an all inspiring threshold of the future. We
have built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies, we have placed time in chains
and we have curved highways midair. This is what our nation has done. What I
want to say to you my friends is that when we look to the other side, something
basic is missing. We suffer from a kind of poverty of the spirit which stands
in glaring contrast to our technological abundance. We’ve learnt to swim the
seas like fish and to fly the air like birds and yet we have not learnt the
simple art of walking like brothers and sisters. This is the great dilemma
facing Uganda and many an African nation. It comes to this point now; we must
all learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will all perish
together as fools!

There
are two things that we must deal with if we are going to transform this
neighborhood into a brotherhood. We have to deal with the problem of tribalism
and we have to deal with the problem of economic and human injustices. More and
more we have to tell the truth about this problems and the truth means saying
to our leaders that tribal injustice is the poor man’s burden and the rich
man’s shame. Admittedly we have made some strides, we’ve made some progress but
this should not cause any of us to become apathetic, lax or complacent. We need
to recognize that the plant of freedom has grown just a bud and not yet a
flower. The problems that we face are still very serious.

Uganda
has constantly made positive steps forward on Human Rights but it has usually
simultaneously made a step backwards. There has never been a single, solid
determined commitment by politicians on the question of genuine equality for
the “poor man and woman”. On 9th October 1962, the poor man and
woman were freed from the bondage of physical slavery through the emancipation
proclamation but he wasn’t “given” any land to make that freedom meaningful. It
was something like having a man unjustly imprisoned for 30 or 40 years and
suddenly you discover that he is innocent, that he has been unjustly jailed for
30 or 40 years and then you simply go up to the man and say, now you are free. But you don’t give him any bus fare to get to
town or somewhere he recalls as home after close to a decade in incarceration.
You don’t give him any money to buy clothes to put on his back. You don’t give
him any money to get on his feet so that he can rise up once more as a man. Emancipation
for the poor was freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of
heaven. It was freedom without a roof over their heads, Freedom without bread
to eat, Freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the
same time. This is what happens to the poor man in Uganda today – he has just
been set free from Jail.

I
have lived in Uganda for a while now and I always get a little worried when I hear
the definition of responsible leader because so often when some people call you
a responsible leader they are really telling you that you are a leader who will
not tell the truth on behalf of your people. So often they mean that you are a
leader more concerned about your budget than you are concerned about the
freedom of your people. So often they really mean that you are a leader willing
to say to the existing power structure what they want to hear rather than what
they ought to hear. If we understand this then we will understand that; the
politician is not protecting what he thinks is morally right, he is defending
what he thinks is morally profitable.

We are somebody.
I will start with my own self by freeing my own psyche, my own soul this is
where i have got to start from, and this is where I think you also need to
consider starting from too.

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